Эллери Куин - Blow Hot, Blow Cold

Masters sat hunched over Larry Connor’s desk, exulting. He had the feeling. It was like swimming after a long layoff, lungs heaving, arms like lead weights, and then, without warning... second wind, breaths easy, no weight, streaking for the nearing shore like a fish. He had the feeling.

The drug has been taken. Larry Connor lies on the sofa waiting to die. As he waits, death becomes dreadful. He begins to feel terror. In spite of everything, he wants to live. And to live he needs help, desperately, quickly, for the drug is already taking effect.

He is groggy now, his thoughts tumbling, his mind clogged. Here is the telephone at hand... can he make it? He struggles off the sofa, manages to get to the desk, unhook the phone. He will call... whom? Perhaps he knows; perhaps he tries. But he cannot remember the number, or he is not coordinating — his forefinger like a swollen thumb on the dial. What would he do?

Call Operator. Surely he could manage one swing of the dial.

Operator answers. He asks her to dial... whom? Ruth Benton? Dying, needing help, would he have summoned Ruth Benton?

No. A man dying of an overdose of a drug he has himself taken would grasp at only one savior.

A doctor.

His doctor ?

Masters sat back. He did not have to answer the question. It could be answered by the operator at the telephone exchange. She would remember the call, to whom it had been placed.

She would. Masters was sure she would. He no more questioned his certainty than he questioned the whole train of thought that had led him to it.

This was right. This was it.

He pressed the button and listened to the harmony of the chimes. The sun blazed in a sky of brilliant blue. The chimes died, and after a moment he aimed his index finger and jabbed again, again listening and glancing at the sun. Still no one came. He had better try the back door.

No one responded to his knock at the back door, either.

He looked off to his right, across the intervening Connor backyard, to the backyard of the Howells. The chances were good that Nancy Howell was at home, and he thought that he would go and bother her just once more.

He could see, when Nancy came to her door, that he was not welcome. He felt regret and loneliness, but he shut them out. He was far too old and jaded to regret what could not be helped, or to try to recover what had long been lost.

“Good morning,” Masters said. “I’m sorry to have to disturb you again.”

“I should hope you would be,” Nancy said. “I should hope you’d be ashamed to disturb me again, ever. I’ve tried my best to help you, and it’s only brought grief to people I like and respect.”

“I’m the one who has brought the grief, Mrs. Howell, not you. It’s inseparable from the job.”

“It’s a rotten job, that’s all I can say!”

“A very rotten job. But somebody has to do it. The other night at the Richmonds’, for example. Do you think I enjoyed that?”

“You were the worst kind of bully, Lieutenant Masters.”

“Bully!” This manifest injustice caused Masters’s voice to skid slightly. “Oh, well. Perhaps I was. I don’t blame you for thinking so. But I’ll cut this short. Do you happen to know where the Richmonds are? They don’t answer either front or back.”

“Well, Jack is a doctor,” Nancy said coldly, “and it’s reasonable to assume that he’s out doctoring.”

“How about Mrs. Richmond?”

“If Vera isn’t home, I don’t know where she is. Maybe she went downtown or to the market.”

“Well, I think I’ll try to track down Dr. Richmond.”

“I wish I could wish you luck, but I don’t.”

“Thanks,” Masters said sadly, “for wishing you could wish.”

He had been holding his hat in his hand. Now he set it squarely on his balding head and made off around the Howell house to the street and across the street to his car. He could hear the spiteful slam of the Howells’ back door. She didn’t even ask me in, he thought. He got into his car and drove downtown.

Dr. Jack Richmond’s office was located in the new Medical Arts Building, a mathematical one-story structure of glass and green brick set behind a lawn so lush it looked artificial. Masters shuffled through the lobby past the gleaming pharmacy and along a long sterile-looking corridor to the all-wood door with “John R. Richmond, M.D.” richly spelled out in stainless steel letters. Masters went in.

The waiting room was empty.

“Dr. Richmond is not in,” the sharp-chinned receptionist in the glassed-in cubicle said. “Do you have an appointment?”

“This isn’t a medical call,” Masters said. He opened his badge case, and her eyes narrowed. “Where is he?”

“He’s usually back from the hospital at this hour,” the receptionist said, “but he called in to say he had an emergency and didn’t know when he’d be back.”

“An emergency at the hospital?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“Look, sister,” Masters said patiently. “Every doctor’s assistant knows where he is every minute. Is he at the hospital?”

“I think so.” She was frightened. “Yes.”

Masters drove over to the hospital. Dr. Richmond was in surgery. An emergency appendectomy. He would have to wait.

Masters cursed under his breath. He loitered. He read the posted hospital rules. He studied a large print showing a group of frock-coated men stooping over a cadaverous-looking naked man on a rough kitchen table, a picture labeled The Surgeons . He leafed through some magazines.

Suddenly he could stand the waiting no longer. He hurried to the elevators. One car was open, and he strode in and punched the number five button. The elevator door closed at a snail’s pace. The ascent to the top floor was interminable.

Lieutenant Masters took up his vigil outside the big double door of the operating theater.

His back to the wall.

Symbolically.

First there was Lila, Nancy thought, now Vera.

Were people to be forever disappearing from Shady Acres? It gave a person the creepiest feeling.

Of course, it was nonsense to think of Vera as having “disappeared.” She had merely gone out. Right now she was probably downtown shopping at Logan’s, or at the supermarket; or maybe she was at the beauty parlor. There were scads of places she could have gone for perfectly good reasons; certainly there was no cause to feel uneasy about her. It was that damned Lieutenant Masters’s fault. Every time he turned up he brought a whiff of doom with him. Vera was fine.

Nevertheless, in the first hour following Masters’s departure, Nancy found a dozen excuses for glancing over to the Richmond house. There was no sign of Vera. But one would hardly expect her to run up a flag to show she was back home. She might have returned at any time during the hour. If so, she had probably left her Volkswagen, the little second car she drove when Jack was off in the Corvette, parked in her drive.

Nancy went to the living room and looked out.

The Volkswagen was not in the Richmond drive or at the curb.

Vera could have run it into the garage, of course. Well, there was nothing to be gained from speculating about it, Nancy told herself. The sensible thing to do was to phone Vera on some pretext or other, just to make sure she was all right.

Nancy went to the phone in the hall and dialed the Richmond number.

She waited through eight rings. There was no answer. Nancy hung up.

Vera simply wasn’t at home. But then why did Nancy persist in having the nagging feeling that she was ?

It could be that Vera, for her own reasons, just wasn’t answering the door or the phone. No, that wasn’t likely. Vera was a well-trained doctor’s wife; any call might be important...